How to Sit with Painful Emotions | World of Psychology

Feeling painful emotions, not surprisingly, can be painful. This is why so many of us don’t do it. Instead, we ignore our emotions, or dismiss them. We try to numb the pain with a glass of wine or three. We isolate ourselves. We cut or burn ourselves, or engage in other kinds of self-harm. Basically, we turn to anything that’ll help us get rid of our feelings. “As humans, we do everything we can do to reduce our suffering and to avoid pain — emotional or physical. So it is difficult to accept the pain and not try to do anything to fight it,” said Sheri Van Dijk, MSW, a psychotherapist in Sharon, Ontario, Canada. Some of us learn early on from our caregivers — that throwing tantrums or turning to substances or self-harm is the way to deal with painful emotions, she said. Others may be highly sensitive. Highly sensitive individuals make up 20 to 30 percent of the population. They “experience things more intensely, and therefore have had more difficulties learning to manage emotions